Sonoma County health officer to allow hair salons, indoor dining, inside shopping, churches by Saturday

Barring a spike in coronavirus cases or people needing hospital care for the highly contagious infectious disease, Sonoma County Health Officer Dr. Sundari Mase said Tuesday she plans to reopen a big portion of economic activity across the county by Saturday.

Mase would move to allow the resumption of indoor dining at restaurants, wineries and brewpubs, in-store shopping, barbershops and hair salons. Also, churches could again welcome inside up to 100 people for religious services.

She described the COVID-19 outbreak in the community as stable and said if the situation holds in the next few days, she'd allow this critical portion of the county's vast services industry to fully reopen for the first time since her original stay-home order went into effect on March 18.

“If our epidemiology holds and we're still at 40 per 100,000 (residents) case rate and we don't see a big spike this week and we don't see a lot of hospitalizations and other negative outcomes, then we plan to open the things the state” gave the green light for early last week, Mase said during her daily press briefing.

Mase said the modifications would bring Sonoma County in line with steps taken by other counties that are reopening quicker than the entire state. Two weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom gave the go-ahead for more economic activities to restart, but Mase decided this county wasn't ready.

The health officer said she wanted to evaluate for two weeks previous modifications to the local stay-home order and that she was concerned about an increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases, recent workplace outbreaks here and cluster of severe hospitalizations.

Earlier Tuesday, Mase told Sonoma County supervisors that local virus conditions have reached a “plateau” and “steady state.”